Ok, I have been on the chat talking with MMan and Delacroix about Unreal pawn stuff. All of the following stuff is true for Unreal difficulty unless specified. Here's a resume:

The GES BioRifle blobs, at least the ones from the secondary fire, appear to be stronger if used as mines. An uncharged blob used as a mine, can instantly kill a Pupae if the creature steps on it... but not all the time. Mine needs to stay untouched for like 3 seconds after being stuck on wall/floor, so supposedly the mine becomes stronger by time until a specific damage max amount? Or perhaps something with collision and hit detection? Anyway, damage of a charged blob stuck on something is much higher than throwing the charged blob onto the enemy.

AMMO-wise, it takes the same amount of Stinger crystals to kill an enemy regardless of what firemode you use. Tested on a Brute, 31 Stinger ammo are needed to kill him; use either single bursts, or machine-gun style, or the secondary fire. No difference. Only problem is that you'll waste 4 more shards if you use the secondary fire only (end up with 35 ammo consumed vs 31).

2 Minigun ammo are worth 1 Automag ammo, damage-wise. That's bad right? How about this: 3 Minigun ammo are worth 1 Automag ammo, damage-wise, if you use the Minigun's secondary fire by just doing burst fires (minimum ammo used per burst is 2). That sucks. So if you use the secondary fire, NEVER DO BURSTS AND HOLD THAT BUTTON DOWN

Skaarj dodge or activate their shields the nanosecond you fire or lock-on, not because shit is coming soon for them. An example: a Skaarj Trooper is miles away. I shoot a DP bolt, sure that it hits the Skaarj. Skaarj puts up the shield as soon as a I fire, but it puts it down because time passed, and like a dumbass he'll eat the bolt. That's of course if you don't shoot again, which will make the Skaarj keep his shield active.

(Info from earlier Unreal versions) Did you know Horseflies were supposed to damage the player a la Biterfish? This is why they harass you. Method was going to be probably the same one used for Biterfish, aka contact damage due to Horseflies' collision being null to the PlayerPawn (but not to the ScriptedPawns).

Damage reduction for Troopers' Shields is high. Takes your projectile damage and divide it by 5.5/6, and that is. Testing against a Trooper in all difficulties, by using the DP's primary fire on level 1: on Easy, DP damage is 16, with shield on is 3; on Medium, DP damage is 15, with shield on is 3; on Hard, DP damage is 13, with shield on is 2; on Unreal, DP damage is 12, with shield on is 2. Eightball rocket you say? A single one does 14 damage against a shield. You need at least 14 rockets to kill a constantly shielded SkaarjTrooper on Unreal difficulty, if he uses his default health of 170 points.The shield efficiency is the same across difficulties, it's just the weapon damage that varies. Weapon damage (when you use them) uses its default property on Medium difficulty only. On other difficulties it increases or lowers. Also, once again to point out, the whole Skaarj Trooper body becomes resistant, the shield is just a visual effect.

Much like all the enemy attack properties, even normal weapons become weaker if Troopers use them, according to the difficulty chosen. Skaarj Officer's blades deal 12 damage on Easy difficulty. Also yep, they can use the secondary fire's blade turn function (and they use that firemode a lot) but only if you strafe left and right - the POV of the enemies is basically locked on you when they have to attack.

Enemies do go from their "CHASE THE PLAYER" tactic to the "RETREAT" one. The opposite thing never happens during battle, no matter what you do. Now let's go on this tactic change.

The "RETREAT" tactic is triggered by a HP battle between the enemy and the player. What happens is that the enemy instantly reads the player's HP and forever decides to go into retreat mode. To make it short and sweet, the system boils down to a numerical comparison between the HP of the contenders, regardless of their max default health. (HP*4)+(HP/2), with HP being the enemy current health, appears to be the formula resulting to the HP amount that the player needs to have his enemy retreats. Tested with a 210 HP Slith, he would start to run away only when I my HP was 462 and over. The tactic change happens anytime - which explains why Skaarj decide to run away when they're low of health. Tested with a SkaarjLord at 320 HP, a SkaarjWarrior at 210 HP and me at 100 HP, both Skaarj decided to run away at 20 HP. I tested again with me having 20 HP and this time the Skaarj decided to NEVER run away no matter what.Only HP is counted, Armor items don't change a thing. Note that if your enemy is chasing you, and you do something to increase your health HIGH enough during a battle, the enemy even there goes into RETREAT mode, just to show the tactic change is fully dynamical. However, as I said in the previous point, once an enemy retreats he won't go back chasing you again if you set your health to be stupid low during battle. Not sure if they go back into chase mode if you go away from the enemy (to the point the enemy stops considering you) and go back to him.All enemies have their retreat mode, regardless of their BRAINS property (perhaps Aggressiveness might change something), except the ones that can only do melee attacks such as Mantas and Flies.

Skaarj dodge or activate their shields the nanosecond you fire or lock-on, not because shit is coming soon for them. An example: a Skaarj Trooper is miles away. I shoot a DP bolt, sure that it hits the Skaarj. Skaarj puts up the shield as soon as a I fire, but it puts it down because time passed, and like a dumbass he'll eat the bolt. That's of course if you don't shoot again, which will make the Skaarj keep his shield active.

For the record, I'm currently developing new Skaarj subclasses that already address this exact issue. "Warn Target" is no longer used in my Skaarj pawns and they use real-time dodging and Skaarj Troopers put their shields up only when a projectile is about to hit them instead of doing what you describe here. I always hated that mechanic in Unreal honestly. You can actually already see a similar functionality with my Buddies mod in dodging projectiles.

Enemies do go from their "CHASE THE PLAYER" tactic to the "RETREAT" one. The opposite thing never happens during battle, no matter what you do. Now let's go on this tactic change.

Good to know. Looks like something else I probably will be changing. The whole number system will be thrown out completely... I can tell you that.

[UDHQ]Jackrabbit wrote:For the record, I'm currently developing new Skaarj subclasses that already address this exact issue. "Warn Target" is no longer used in my Skaarj pawns and they use real-time dodging and Skaarj Troopers put their shields up only when a projectile is about to hit them instead of doing what you describe here. I always hated that mechanic in Unreal honestly. You can actually already see a similar functionality with my Buddies mod in dodging projectiles.

Enemies do go from their "CHASE THE PLAYER" tactic to the "RETREAT" one. The opposite thing never happens during battle, no matter what you do. Now let's go on this tactic change.

Good to know. Looks like something else I probably will be changing. The whole number system will be thrown out completely... I can tell you that.

Those new Skaarj subclasses would be super welcome hope to hear more from this!

Nali: Magic or Telekinesis

Waffnuffly wrote:It's tarydium-doped smoothies. Drunk by the player, I mean. The player is tripping balls. The whole game actually takes place in a large city and the player thinks he's on an alien world.

Placed pawn's health/collisionradius/collisionheight * his current drawscale / his default drawscale. It's in the main Pawn code, so it affects every single pawn and not just scripted ones. It's forced; for collision values that's nice but I know a lot of people (like me) really hate the health change, leading to enemies having unexpectedly more health because you forgot that's one of the things drawscale automatically does when it's edited. Keep that in mind. It's easy to keep track of the HP change if the creature's default drawscale is 1 because the calculation boils down to just HP * drawscale (no division necessary, you divide the result by 1).With scriptedpawns, the modified HP will be modified further if BIsBoss=True.

There are probably a lot of tiny things I found out over the years thanks to EXU2/BuffSkeleton (i.e. orders like "Ambushing" which is helpful as fuck in some situations), I'll probably come back to this thread sometimes.